Intel MIC, Dell and Nvidia prop up US supercomputer

Intel is sending the University of Texas a Knights Corner chip that sports over 50 cores.

Both the Texas Advanced Cumpiting Center and University of Texas will enjoy a supercomputer named Stampede that features 10 petaflops of performance altogether. The main reason is Intel’s Many Integrated Core Knights Corner, which counts for 8 petaflops. It will also sport thousands of Dell Zeus servers, each running dual eight-core processors from Intel’s E5 Xeons. Each will have 32 gigabytes of memory.

Nvidia enjoyed a contract win from the university, too, with 128 of its GPUs sitting in the machine. There are also 16 Dell servers with one terabyte of shared memory, and two GPUs for analysing big data.

Stampede’s total performance will be 10 petaflops, 272 terabytes of memory and 14 petabytes of storage, which, if you haven’t guessed already, is a lot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS

It will be the most powerful supercomputer in the US, and will have support for at least four years.

While it’s running, Stampede will contribute to over 1,000 projects in computational, data-driven science and engineering all across America. While it’s running, it will contribute to optimising Intel’s MIC architecture. There will be a new data centre for the system courtesy of the University of Texas, which should appear in November 2011. Stampede should be up and running in 2013.